Cashback compounder.
2% on a card invested for decades.
2% cashback that auto-deposits and gets invested compounds quietly over decades. Enter your monthly card spend to see what your cashback becomes if invested rather than spent.
The question it answersWhat does 2% credit card cashback become if I invest it instead of spending it?
Rules: United States. Privacy: runs in your browser. What you enter stays on your device unless you copy a share link, which puts your inputs in the link.
Worked example: $3,000/month card spend × 2% = $720/year cashback. $720/year invested at 7% real return for 30 years compounds to roughly $68,000. The card is invisible wealth-building: same spending, additional accumulation. The math depends on paying off the balance every month. At 20%+ APRAnnual Percentage Rate (APR)The yearly cost of borrowing money, shown as a percentage.Full definition, any carried balance erases years of cashback gains.
Projection, not a promise. The result follows the assumptions you enter. Real results will differ, sometimes by a lot.
How this tool works
- Annual cashback = monthly spend × 12 × cashback rate.
- Future value of an ordinary annuity: PMT × ((1+r)^n - 1) / r, where PMT is annual cashback, r is annual return, n is years.
- The "cash kept" comparison assumes no return on the cashback (it sits in checking).
- This calculation requires you to invest the cashback automatically. Most people who plan to invest it do not. The Fidelity Rewards Visa deposits cashback into a Fidelity account; auto-investing into a fund (e.g., FZROX) takes one additional setting per Fidelity's current product documentation.
- Carrying a credit-card balance erases this math instantly. At 20%+ APR, any rolled-over balance costs more than the cashback earns. The 2% only works if you pay in full every month.
- Returns are nominal unless you've subtracted inflationinflationA general increase in prices over time, meaning each dollar buys less than it did before.Full definition from your assumption. The site uses 7% as a moderate long-run real return, 10% as a moderate long-run nominal return.
Not financial advice. The card and the cashback rate are real; verify current terms before opening any product.
HOW THIS IS CALCULATED
This tool runs entirely in your browser: no data is sent to any server. The rules are listed under “How this tool works” above. The core math:
- Annual cashback = monthly spend × 12 × cashback rate.
- Invested value = annual cashback × ((1 + r)years − 1) ÷ r: one deposit at the end of each year, compounding at return r. At 0% it is annual cashback × years.
- Kept as cash = annual cashback × years, earning nothing. Growth from investing = invested value − kept as cash.
The 2% default is the card's rate: 2 points per dollar of eligible net purchases, worth 2% only when redeemed into an eligible Fidelity account[2]. The 7% return is an editable default; the result is in today's dollars only if the rate entered is after inflation. Not modeled: monthly deposits, taxes on the investment, fund fees, and interest on a carried balance. Verify the methodology or inspect the source code in your browser's dev tools.
Where to go from here
Sources
Bracketed numbers and verify badges in the text link to these sources. Figures, rates and rules change: check each source’s date before acting on it.
- Fidelity Investments, Fidelity Visa Signature card ↩
- Fidelity Investments, Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature Card. Checked 2026-09-26. ↩
Calculators are educational estimates, not financial advice. Disclosures · How pages are reviewed